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Anthony Fauci isn’t convinced Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers are going to need to produce an Omicron-specific version of their vaccines. Rather, the long-time director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases suggested to STAT in an interview Thursday, it’s possible the current vaccines will provide enough protection against the new variant for most vaccinated and boosted individuals. (Branswell, 12/10)

A big hurdle for developing variant vaccines is what immunologists call “original antigenic sin,” a phenomenon documented in flu and other infectious diseases, where the body returns to the immune response mounted against its first encounter with a pathogen—or vaccine—when faced with a slightly different variant. Evidence is building that this phenomenon, also known as immune imprinting, is at work in Covid-19. The implication: Boosting with an Omicron-specific vaccine might only reawaken earlier immune responses, whether they were spurred by vaccination or infection. In other words, an Omicron-specific vaccine may have no advantage over simply boosting with the original vaccines. (Roland, 12/9)

Scientists have detected traces of omicron in wastewater in Houston, Boulder, Colo., and two cities in Northern California. It's a signal that indicates the coronavirus variant is present in those cities, and it highlights the useful data produced by wastewater surveillance research as omicron looms. Gathering this data requires careful collaboration among wastewater facilities, engineers, epidemiologists and labs. Scientists and public health officials say the data derived from samples of feces can help fill in the gaps from other forms of surveillance and help them see the big picture of the coronavirus pandemic, especially as a new variant emerges. (Maria Dillon, 12/9)

Most if not all of the guests wore masks when the Nov. 27 wedding ceremony started at a Wisconsin celebration that is now the suspected origin of an outbreak of COVID-19 and the omicron variant among Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland Medical Center staff, according to an attendee. But as the celebration wore on, the cocktails came out and people took to the dance floor, many leaving their masks behind, said Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist and associate dean of public health at Michigan State University, who was in attendance and believes she contracted the coronavirus there. (Johnson, 12/9)

Companies of all sizes are rethinking their plans to send workers back to the office as the new omicron variant adds another layer of uncertainty. Alphabet’s Google and the nation’s second largest automaker Ford Co. are among those once again delaying their return-to-office plans, while other businesses whose employees have already returned are considering adding extra precautions like requiring masks. Officials in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway and Sweden also have asked people in recent days to work from home if they can because of concerns about the variant. (D'Innocenzio, 12/10)

Here’s the upshot: Each fully vaccinated person might still be at minimal risk of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID this winter, but the vestiges of normalcy around them could start to buckle or even break. In the worst-case scenario, highly vaccinated areas could also see “the kind of overwhelmed hospital systems that we saw back in 2020 with the early phase in Boston and New York City,” Samuel Scarpino, a network scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, told me. If only a small percentage of Omicron infections lead to hospitalization, the variant is still spreading with such ferocity that millions of people could need a bed. (Gutman, 12/9)

By the end of next year, the Covid pandemic could be over.But that doesn’t mean the coronavirus will disappear. In a blog post on Tuesday, Bill Gates laid out one seemingly likely scenario: “At some point next year, Covid-19 will become an endemic disease in most places. ”If Covid becomes an endemic illness — a disease of relatively low severity that constantly circulates throughout certain parts of the world — the sickness’ pandemic phase could come to a close in 2022, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire health philanthropist wrote. (Stieg, 12/9)